Spoon becoming a library of standalone components

Written by Davy Hellemans -
August5th,
2011

The last year I've been seeing a lot of php libraries and frameworks going towards standalone
components. The first that comes to mind is Symfony.
How great is it that you can pick a single component you like and use that in your project without
being forced to use the entire framework/library. It's pretty awesome, let me tell you that!

With Spoon Library I'm choosing to take the same route. What does that mean? Well, I've started
creating separate git repo's (on github) that only have one
package/component. There are no dependencies forced from within the library. If you do need some
functionality between packages, there will be a plugin system. Of course you will still be able
to download the entire library at once.

Let me give you an example:
The template engine is being tweaked and all hardcoded dependencies for SpoonForm are removed.
Instead there will be a 'form plugin' that you can use if you wish to use forms within the template
package. Each plugin will list which version of a component is required to be able to use it. That
means you will be able to upgrade specific components without having to worry about other functionality.
Say you upgrade the template engine to the latest version, then you will be notified if other plugins
you are trying to use will cause any known problems.

Only the most basic packages have been somewhat converted to the PHP 5.3 components. You can check
them out on github.

Updates

Spoon::dump: improve Xdebug var_dump detection
It is possible to have Xdebug loaded, but not have it override the var_dump
output. This leaves the output lacking.
Note that Xdebug is smart about the SAPI: it only outputs HTML when it is
expected to. The source git